Sometimes downloading a white paper or study is a waste of time. I have downloaded hundreds of lead-generating ebooks and have found very few of them to be worth the time. Occasionally, a big study or survey piece will reveal some salient points, and I’m glad to have read it, but really it’s about 10% of the overall content. Here in a severaly abbreviated form is The State of Mobile Marketing 2017 from Incite Group and OpenMobile Media.

Here are the most important mobile challenges as outlined by the study.

Content and Context and Relevance are the top two challenges. How do you build a mobile app or platform that is relevant and valuable to your customers? Tons of businesses are creating apps that do nothing well. They are simply entries into the crowded mobile space. If you don’t understand the content part of the equation, it does not matter if you have an app or not.

Creating a personalized customer experience. That’s the top potential. How do you go about doing that? What mobile feature has not been covered? How does your app or program provide something new, something useful, something unique?

Make note that brand awareness and increased engagement are the top two objectives of mobile marketing. Sales is not the primary goal. When building a mobile program are you concentrating too much on sales? Do you have the budget to build something for brand awareness that does not drive sales?

The mobile marketing space is hard and apps are expensive to produce. And if they don’t increase revenue, what is the point?

Maybe you should concentrate on how well you site performs in the mobile browsing experience. Well over half your audience is viewing your site on their phone. And that includes B2B sites as well.

Get your mobile act together before you consider a mobile app. And make sure you understand the content that your audience would find valuable. Sales messaging is not going to fly and will get your app dropped, ignored, and deleted.

In the beginning most of my blogging was focused on a technology and marketing. A very male audience.

60% of my audience for uber.la still comes in through desktops. And if I didn’t update my information, it would be easy for me to look at my “typical” audience and think that mobile was less important.

BUT, two other blogs I work on, have a female-centric audience an the technology has flipped. 57% – 60% of my audience for these two blogs are coming through phones or tablets. WOW. I didn’t know it had shifted that far. I’m glad I use well designed responsive designs that have cogent mobile themes. I’m going to go check them a bit deeper and make sure I’m serving the mobile visitor.

Are you up to date on your mobile visitor mix? What’s your percentage? And how’s your mobile theme looking today?

[An uber.la quickie is a streamlined takeaway from today’s best marketing sources]

The new buzzword is “customer journey.” Combine persona with purchase path and I think you get a pretty good idea what the customer journey is. Perhaps a bit more nuance on the different stages of the buying experience the web visitor is in, what part of the funnel they are in on their journey. But you get the idea. The alarming stat here is that

42% haven’t done the research
12% have talked about it, but not taken action
3% say it hasn’t been made a priority

So over 57% of businesses surveyed have yet to really begin the basic building block of digital transformation in drawing out the map of the customer journey? This IS a problem.

If we combine the new SEO trend towards social media importance, and we look at companies needing to radically alter their digital marketing based on understanding their own unique “customer journey” we’d have a digitally agile and performance-based company.

How far along the path to digital transformation is your company? What’s it going to take for your business objectives to align with your digital marketing objectives.

Digital transformation carries expectations that its impact can be measured at both customer and business levels. Of course, if it can contribute to the bottom line, the CFO and CEO are going to be interested. But if the success is only measured in “activity” or “share of voice” you are going to have a harder case to make for the effort to transform your company in to a more digital savvy organization.

And when the transformation has begun, what are the most important disciplines that are being addressed?

The bottom line: Digital transformation is critical for any companies doing business on the web. Often lead by the CMO, the culture of the company requires a shift to make the leap to a fully-activated digital marketing department. In the beginning the effort is a marketing push, but in the end the transformation has to reach every team to achieve full impact.

It’s a digital marketplace. Even if your company is not directly involved in eCommerce, you need to understand your digital footprint so you can shape and influence the activity on the web. Your potential customers and current customers are watching what you are doing. And they are watching what others are saying about you. In order to take full benefit of the digital marketplace you have to be in the conversation at all stages. From discovery, leading into evaluation, and on into sales and support, your digital approach requires a holistic effort.

If you need help along any of the transformational stages, let us know, we can help.

You’ve got a message you need to distribute to thousands of potential users of your new product

It’s a tech product, an app or a mobile-aware site that needs techie traffic and commerce

You know some heavy Twitter users who might love your product

You’ve done your #hashtag research and you’ve identified the BIG influencers on Twitter

Now what do you do?

That depends on who you consult with.

What Twitter Says: “Buy a Promoted Tweet and we’ll get you in front of millions of engaged and interested users.”

What Facebook Says: “We’re the biggest, the most advanced, we can spend your money faster than any other platform. We get results you can track.”

What an Online Marketing Agency Says: “We can build an awareness program for you. With Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube combined. We do this integrated marketing stuff all the time. Have you had a look at our Twitter stats? And check our blog, for some interesting case studies.”

What an SEO-Marketing Agency Says: “It’s all about the numbers. We can get you in the top listings on Google so you don’t have to pay for ads. We will optimize and optimize and stay on top of Google’s changing processes so you don’t have to.”

What an Influencer Agency Says: “We’ll build a cloud of influencers and encourage them to talk about your product. We can do this on a limited budget, and we have case studies to show how it has worked for our previous customers in [name the type of business you are trying to win as a client].”

What a Social Media Consultant Says: “Here’s how I’ve seen this process work. I don’t know if it will work in your specific market, but I can get the supporting data, do a little research, and get back to you with a budget and a timeline for your program.”

I’ve worked, and still work, for several of the types of businesses outlined above. And I can tell you, from several years in the business of manufacturing and selling influence, that it’s not a straight TWEETS-TO-ROI proposition. There are tools that can help. There are analytics measurements you can watch. And there are some amazing programs to analyze twitter, facebook, pinterest, and any other social network you want to work with. But the tools won’t get you there.

In fact the agency, strategist, and influencer won’t get you there. It’s not a package deal that I can wrap up in an eBook and sell you. I’d like to get it to such a science, but today, in the blizzard of social media it is hard to know what will work, and harder to come up with unique and innovative ways to engage and capture the imaginations and dollars of your potential customer online.

They are on mobile devices more than you can imagine. (check your stats)

Facebook is still king, but Facebook has limited usefulness if you are trying to drive sales of a product or service.

Search is very important, but what they do after they find your site and land on your page is more important.

Yes, you do have to spend time understanding and managing every single social media network that you want to influence.

Make sure your team, strategist, or agency, has some people who actually PARTICIPATE in the conversation. Writing about Twitter ain’t the same as building a Twitter following, and growing your Twitter influence. (This goes for Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and blogging as well.)

Gluing all the social processes together is CONTENT. If you don’t have good quality stuff to share, you won’t be sharing much except HEY LOOK HERE’S A 10% OFF COUPON. And that’s not going to grow your influence very far, unless you are Dell Factory Outlet or Living Social.

If there were an easy roadmap to influence and fame, I’d probably be trying to sell it to you right now for $5.99 or in weekly installments for $15.99. [Probably I should package something up like that.]

Rather, I’d like to teach you what I’ve learned. Give you the ammo to learn and become an influencer, or online marketer yourself. And if you run a small business, I hope I can provide some entry points to getting social media to work for your business.

I’ve seen programs fail. I’ve seen HUGE community developments [build it and they will come] remain beautiful ghost towns. And I’ve hit a few home runs over the years. And the same truths have held true for all of them.

All the case studies in the world are not going to get you experience building AdWords campaigns, or wrestling with the Power Builder tool in Facebook. But until you do try some things. Until you see what works and what fails. Until you’ve tried to answer a client’s question, “How is Twitter going to help my dry cleaning business?” you’re still getting your feet wet. It’s all theoretical until you’ve tried it.

Even a large-scale campaign, with ten thousand dollars of Google AdWords budget, isn’t going to score a victory unless you can CONVERT that ACTIVITY and TRAFFIC into SALES.

Yes, we’re all tired of hearing about how to make the case for ROI and SOCIAL MEDIA. But guess what, I still have to make that case every day. I’m doing it here. And you will have to do it too. So get out there, try some things, track everything, and share when you find something that works.

There is enough traffic out there for all of us. Sure we’re competing for the same eyeballs and iPhones screens, but I’d bet we’d learn a lot more from each other by sharing than simply gaming each others BID AMOUNT in Google Adwords. Besides, the app/device/service I am interested in promoting is probably not related to yours. If it is, well, we can still share best-practices rather than data.

Most companies are very sacred about their data. That’s okay. I understand. But it’s just data. It’s what we do with that information going forward that counts. Analytics is about what happened in the PAST. We make social media decisions about the FUTURE.